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Seven great social campaigns from September

While scouring the internet for ideas and information I often stumble across interesting and innovative social campaigns that deserve to be highlighted to the masses.

Until now we didn’t have a forum in which to share these examples, so this is my first attempt at rounding up some of the most interesting campaigns that have launched in the previous month or so.

Expedia’s travel tweets

Inspired by TV ads that ran earlier in the year, Expedia launched a follow-up Twitter campaign this month that aimed at spicing up lacklustre tweets.

The idea behind the campaign is to ‘Travel Yourself Interesting’, so Expedia took otherwise mundane tweets and jazzed them up by creating videos of people reciting the words in exotic locations.

For example, it took one reality TV star’s tweet about going out with her friends and got a naked cowboy to sing it in Times Square.

Twitter users can then include the hashtag #TYI in their own dull tweets to stand a chance of winning a trip to Abu Dhabi.

A quick search on Topsy shows that there have been more than 3,000 tweets in the past 30 days using the hashtag, which doesn’t seem like a great return when compared to a BA campaign further down this post.

Lotto sings ‘Ooh-wakka-doo’

To promote the fact that it is revamping its Lotto game, Camelot has launched a competition to get people to create a video of themselves singing a cover of Gilbert O’Sullivan’s ‘Ooh-wakka-doo’.

It’s dubbed as a YouTube sing-along competition and the person who gets the most online votes stands to win £20,000.

The combination of a big cash prize and TV advertising should help to ensure that it attracts quite a few entries.

Bacon vs. Oliver

Another YouTube ad, this time one from EE that features the double whammy of Kevin Bacon and Jamie Oliver.

The ad, which was initially launched on Oliver’s YouTube channel, promotes the fact that EE’s 4G service means that videos load faster and don’t have to buffer.

The clip sees its two stars competing to see who can make the best bacon sandwich, with Oliver eventually losing when he starts to buffer.

Poo-Pourri

This isn’t so much a social campaign as a viral video that caught on because it’s a ridiculous ad for a stupid product.

Nonetheless, the Poo-Pourri ad was uploaded on September 10 and has so far been viewed 10.4m times.

Nivea hijacks Fashion Week

Cosmetics brand Nivea tried to boost its fashion credentials by launching an ‘Outfit of the day’ promotion during London Fashion Week in collaboration with designer Giles Deacon.

‘Outfit of the day’ is apparently a popular trend among fashion bloggers using the hashtag #OOTD.

Nivea Soft hijacked it by encouraging users to share their fashion looks on Twitter and Instagram using #OOTD and the additional hashtag #NIVEASOFT.

Fifteen of the entrants are currently competing in a public vote, with the creator of the #OOTD photo that receives the most votes winning a style consultation with Deacon.

Race the Plane

British Airways also ran a social competition in September, giving entrants the chance to win tickets to Toronto and LA.

It was advertised using Twitter’s Promoted Trends and all users had to do was go to a dedicated website and tweet using the hashtag #RaceThePlane. The idea was that the tweets powered a virtual plane that raced a genuine aircraft making the flight across the Atlantic.

It was certainly visible within my timeline as a number of the people I follow entered the competition (including myself) and according to Topsy there were more than 30,000 tweets using the hashtag in the past 30 days.

Tweet 4 a Table

It may have been running since June, but ‘Tweet 4 a Table’ did host two events in September so I’ve bent the rules to allow it into this post.

Tweet 4 a Table is a Co-operative Food event that allows Twitter users to bag a free meal for up to four people at the retailer’s pop-up restaurant.

Users have to send a tweet that includes the hashtag and the sitting they’d like to attend, for example: “I would like a table for 3 at 12pm to enjoy on Thursday in Manchester! @Tweet4aTable #Tweet4aTable.”

The campaign is to promote Co-Op’s range of foods aimed at those of us who are busy and cash-strapped, and judging by @SpamellaB’s write up it’s quite an enjoyable experience.

If you think I’ve missed any or want to flag up some decent campaigns that are due to launch in the near future then leave a comment or get in touch at david.moth@econsultancy.com…

But the precise use of video will differ depending on what you’re trying to sell, as clothing retailers will obviously have a different sales pitch to a software vendor. So with this in mind here are six examples of businesses that got creative with their product videos.

And to find out more about how to get creative with marketing, come to Econsultancy’s Punch event. Curated by Creative Review, Punch showcases the best of insight-driven creative and forms part of our week-long Festival of Marketing extravaganza.

We’ve covered second screening a bit on this blog (like this on Twitter’s lead over Facebook), but with Zeebox providing an ever more sophisticated product, I don’t think we’ve fully taken stock of the possibilities for advertisers.

Yesterday I attended Mobile Marketing Live and listened to Ernesto Schmitt, CEO and Co-Founder of Zeebox, talking about the future for the product, and TV in general.

In this post I’ll look at what Zeebox looks like now, which broadcasters are supporting it, opportunities for advertisers, and other possible revenue streams for the company.

The question I’ll attempt to answer – ‘Are the incentives for users as broad as those for advertisers?’

Since we started to work on mapping influence patterns, I have been wondering if we could find easy recognizable patterns in influence maps. If so, we could probably predict influence patterns and the secret of ROI optimisation would be eventually revealed to CMOs !!! Stimulating thought.

The recent history of science showed that behind apparently unpredictable phenomena, patterns could in fact be identified.

Further, similar patterns could be applied to domains as diverse as weather forecasting, traffic modelling or the evolution of populations: this is chaos theory.

So, could chaos theory explain patterns of influence on social media and resolve one of the biggest social media marketing enigmas for brands?

According to a newly-published study published by Pew, nearly three-quarters of Facebook users polled said they didn’t know that Facebook generates and stores data about their interests and traits, and, when they came to learn this, over half indicated that they were uncomfortable with Facebook’s practice.

Mastercard, the third-largest credit card processor in the US, has announced a new policy that will make it more difficult for some businesses to automatically convert free trials into recurring subscriptions.